THE OCCULTATION OF LETITIA ELIZABETH LANDON

FRANCIS J. SYPHER

Admired in her time, this author fell quickly from view, but her genius is now being rediscovered.

The literary star known as “L.E.L.,” pen name of the British poet, novelist, and critic Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802-1838), rose to prominence around 1824. But after her death in 1838 in Africa, her fame went into occultation, and her works were largely lost from public view until the last two decades. It is a tantalizing mystery, in many respects. Why, with her brief but impressive career, did Letitia Landon fade so quickly and utterly from the literary world? The story of L.E.L.’s life and work offers an object lesson in the power of cultural forces to create, and then destroy, an artistic reputation. But while lesser lights may expire, genius continues to shine. In the case of L.E.L., her works and a reputation once lost have now been revived.

A STAR IS BORN

Letitia Landon’s father, John Landon (1756-1824), of a Herefordshire family, had served in the British Navy and voyaged to the southern coast of Africa and to Jamaica. Upon his return to civilian life, he joined a firm of army agents, Adair & Co., in Pall Mall. On June 15, 1797, at St. Luke’s, Chelsea, he married Catherine Jane Bishop (1770/71- 1856). They lived at 25 Hans Place, then a new neighborhood of Georgian-style town houses designed by Henry Holland. There, on August 14, 1802, Letitia Landon, the eldest of three children, was born. During this period, John Landon took a major financial interest in Coventry Farm, Middlesex, where he carried out experiments in modern agriculture. Around 1809, he and his family moved to Trevor Park, East Barnet, a historic country house dating from about 1611. Letitia Landon would wander in the woods and overgrown old gardens, reading voraciously and beginning to compose poems almost as soon as she could write.

However, after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, in 1815, the family finances suffered from the decline of her father’s firm and the severe agricultural depression that developed during peacetime. The Landons gave up Trevor Park and Coventry Farm, and settled in a suburban house at Old Brompton, a move that was to have far-reaching effects on their daughter’s future. Across the lane lived William Jerdan, editor of The Literary Gazette, a London magazine known for its influence on sales of books reviewed in its pages.

The story has often been told of how the family showed some of their daughter’s verses to Jerdan, who was amazed at their precocity since he had seen the author running around the driveway rolling a hoop, with a hoop-stick in one hand and, in the other, an open book that she read as she ran. Her first published poem, titled “Rome,” appeared in The Literary Gazette, No. 164 (Saturday, March 11, 1820), when Landon was 17.

Other poems by Landon soon appeared in the Gazette and in August 1821, she brought out a volume titled The Fate of Adelaide, a Swiss Romantic Tale; and Other Poems, dedicated to the famous stage personality Sarah Siddons, a family friend. The book sold few copies, but in 1822, when the author began publishing romantic poems under the initials “L.E.L.,” she began to acquire an enthusiastic following. Her second book of poems, The Improvisatrice (1824), went into six editions, was reprinted in America, and eventually was published at Frankfurt, in English and German. L.E.L. was launched on a literary career of international dimensions.

In subsequent years, Landon published several more volumes of poetry: The Troubadour (1825); The Golden Violet (1827); and The Venetian Bracelet (1829). Each of these, like her previous volumes, contained a lengthy narrative poem as the title-piece, followed by shorter poems, some drawn from her publications in the periodical press or from the popular annuals of the time, such as Forget Me Not and The Keepsake. At this time, Landon also began writing book reviews and other articles for the Gazette. These pieces were published anonymously, but her authorship was known in literary circles, where she became familiar as a successful author. She also was known as an attractive figure at fashionable London salons.

It needs to be emphasized, to counter a common misconception, that Landon was, throughout her literary career, a hardworking professional writer, and not a wealthy dilettante. Her father’s speculative ventures had exhausted his resources before his death in November 1824. From the earnings of her literary work, Landon supported herself, her mother, an invalid sister, and a brother who was studying at Oxford. For most of Landon’s adult life she lived apart from her family, in a sparsely furnished garret in a boarding house at 22 Hans Place, across the street from her birthplace (see Figure 1).

In the course of the 1820s and 1830s, popular literary taste was rapidly shifting from poetry to fiction. In recognition of this trend, Landon had begun to publish short stories as early as 1824, and in 1831 she emerged as a novelist with Romance and Reality, filled with bons mots and pen sketches of literary figures of the day (see Figure 2). A portion was published in French translation in the Revue des deux mondes. The book was glowingly reviewed by Landon’s friend Edward Bulwer (later Bulwer-Lytton). This success was followed by two well-received historical novels, Francesca Carrara (1834) and Ethel Churchill (1837), which was later translated into German and Dutch.

Landon also published a children’s book, Traits and Trials of Early Life (1836), including an autobiographical story, “The History of a Child.” At about this time, Landon published her sixth volume of poems, The Vow of the Peacock (1835), with the theme of the title-poem taken from a painting by Daniel Maclise, who is perhaps best remembered today for his series of portrait sketches in Fraser’s Magazine. Her books were published in American editions, including a comprehensive volume of her collected works in poetry and fiction, published in Philadelphia in 1838, and often reprinted in later years.

During the 1830s, Landon also was the editor and, for the most part, the sole author of eight volumes of Fisher’s Drawing Room Scrap Book, one of the most impressive annuals. It was distributed not only in London, but also in New York, Paris, Berlin, and St. Petersburg. For this work, she wrote poems as “illustrations” to accompany handsome, large-format engravings. A number of her earlier poems had been inspired by pictures, and had established her as a specialist in writing about works of art. In spite of the forced conditions of composition, some of her finest poems—as she herself stated, not without irony—appeared in the Drawing Room Scrap Book. Landon also edited and wrote the entire contents for Heath’s Book of Beauty for 1833.

In literary London, the poet had drawn the attention of a number of men, and some of her friendships had given rise to malicious gossip. Her engagement to John Forster (critic, and biographer of Walter Savage Landor and Charles Dickens) had been broken around 1835, as a result of rumors about her. But in October 1836, she met and soon became engaged to George Maclean, governor of the British post at Cape Coast (in present-day Ghana), West Africa. They were married at St. Mary’s, Bryanston Square, on June 7, 1838. On June 28th, Landon watched the coronation procession of Queen Victoria, and then made her first and only railway journey, to Portsmouth, where she and her husband set sail for Africa on July 5th.

After a long, uneventful voyage, the ship anchored at Cape Coast on August 15th, one day after Landon’s thirty-sixth birthday. There are conflicting accounts of her married life at Cape Coast Castle, an old Portuguese trading fort of a type that can be seen all along the Guinea Coast. Some say that Landon and her husband were happy; others assert that the couple were utterly incompatible. Questions of every sort arose after Landon’s sudden death, without previous symptoms of illness, on the morning of October 15th. After a brief inquest, at which it was determined she had died from an overdose of medicine, she was buried the evening of the same day. The workers proceeded by torchlight, amid a heavy tropical downpour. Her gravestone can be seen today, beside that of her husband (who died in 1847), in the pavement of the courtyard of Cape Coast Castle, facing the Gulf of Guinea.

On January 1, 1839, the news of Landon’s death was published in a London evening paper, The Courier, and reported prominently the next day in The Times. The story shocked the literary world, and provoked suspicions that Landon might have committed suicide, or might have been murdered. Others suggested that she might have died from a heart attack or “spasm” of some kind, for which she customarily took medication. The subject continued to occupy the public for months, even years, afterward. In fact, the so-called “mystery” of her death became the defining event by which she was remembered, even well into the 20th century.

ECLIPSE AND EMERGENCE

As the Victorian era unfolded, Landon and other writers of the late 1820s and 1830s became overshadowed by the growing reputations of the great romantic poets, and by the rise of great Victorians, such as Tennyson, Browning, and Dickens. When Landon was remembered at all as a writer, it was as the author of merely fashionable verse, and negligible fiction, during a dull interim period. It became a puzzle to later critics how she could have been so overrated by perceptive contemporaries. Nevertheless, volumes of her poems remained in print until at least 1880.

To understand the full history of Landon’s literary reputation and the conflicting opinions about her work, one must look back to the beginning of her career. Her first sponsor, William Jerdan, had little talent as an original writer, but as editor of The Literary Gazette had built up a successful magazine that could make or break an author’s career. His sympathies were allied with the Tory gentry and with the business interests of certain publishers, such as Henry Colburn. Many of Jerdan’s leading reviews were overblown with praise for favored authors, and brought against him and his favorites charges of “puffery,” especially from authors slighted in his pages, and from journals with opposing political views.

Landon came in for a large share of such criticism. Jerdan’s praise for her works was occasionally so excessive as to be patently absurd, as when he described Romance and Reality as the “most striking” novel to appear since Scott’s Waverley (1814). In the long run, such statements did Landon more harm than good, since they encouraged other critics to find fault with her in order to rectify the balance of opinion. Even long after Landon’s time, critics labeled her a “spoiled woman,” and asserted that overpraise of her work had led her to write carelessly. Furthermore, as a reviewer for the Gazette and for other journals, Landon was sometimes unsparing in her own criticisms. Landon was known for her fun and wit, but occasionally her remarks stung. In the rough-and-tumble world of London journalism, authors who were disparaged by her would reach for an opportunity to take revenge. And she became the object of a certain amount of fear and hostility on the part of women who saw her as a rival, or a threat.

After the passage of the Reform Bill in 1832, Tory interests steadily lost ground. The political and social influence of the commercial classes grew, and their tastes helped shape the literature of the day, which came to be characterized by evangelical piety; by interest in scientific matters, such as the idea of evolution; by sympathy with middle-class values; and by the desire for improvement and reform. Expensive, elegant, aesthetically complex volumes like the literary annuals went completely out of fashion, as did their authors. George Eliot in Middlemarch (1871- 1872) characterizes such books as silly, snobbish, sentimental tokens of a bygone time. Landon’s close identification with the annuals, which had helped make her fame and had paid her well, was turned against her literary reputation in a later cultural climate, and such disparagement persisted through the 1950s.

Landon, therefore, had been attacked by hostile critics while she was living, and was generally dismissed unread after her death, as a result of social and political changes. However, the story of her life retained a certain fascination and seemed made for fiction: the precocious young poet who suddenly became famous; the independent single woman who was a bit “fast” and was the victim of scurrilous rumors; the writer who made a desperate marriage and died strangely in an exotic land (see Figure 3). Such is the outline that prompted two fiction-like biographies: Mrs. D. E. Enfield’s study, L. E. L.: A Mystery of the Thirties (1928), published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press; and a novelistic biography by Helen Ashton, Letty Landon (1951). And at least two mystery novels were inspired by Landon’s history: The Golden Violet (1941), by “Joseph Shearing,” pen name of Gabrielle Margaret Vere Campbell, better known as “Marjorie Bowen”; and Eight Weeks: A Novel (1965), by Clyde Chantler, who had lived on the Gold Coast, and well understood the African setting.

Nevertheless, while such books kept Landon in memory, they diverted attention from her literary accomplishments. To me, one of the most remarkable aspects of her life is the sheer quantity and variety of her publications, within the relatively brief space of about 18 years, not to mention her letters, some of which are filled with wit and charm. But the real significance of Landon’s achievement is in her “genius,” which was commented upon by discerning readers and critics, such as Bulwer, Thackeray, Landor, and E. B. Browning. Her influence appears in the work of Tennyson and Poe—and doubtless many others who would not have been eager to acknowledge their debts to Landon, once her works came to be regarded as obsolete and trivial.

Some of the reasons why Landon’s works have been neglected have already been mentioned. Three more are worth noting. First, since she wrote so much, often in haste, her work is inevitably uneven. To judge her fairly, one has to read widely in her works and appreciate their overall quality. It is easy to pick out individual lines and passages as objects of ridicule, or to cite lesser works as if they were representative of the whole. Such critical tactics are always unfair and can be applied to any author, from Shakespeare down the list.

Second, as most of Landon’s books went out of print and out of fashion, they became extremely scarce. Today, even large research libraries tend to have few copies of the original editions. When a writer’s works are virtually unobtainable, it is easy for hostile critics to depreciate the author, since few are able to do the difficult, time-consuming research required to formulate a challenge to the prevailing view. Even her bibliography, until recently, has been hard to unravel, and many of her periodical contributions remain untraced. The matter has more than merely bibliographic interest, since some of Landon’s uncollected works reveal a spirit of satire and mockery that is largely imperceptible in her more familiar publications, yet adds to our appreciation of her complexity.

Third, until fairly recently, women poets and novelists have often been treated with condescension, and their works brushed aside unread. There are obvious exceptions, such as Jane Austen, and the Brontë sisters. But apart from studies by specialist scholars, 20th-century critical opinion has generally declined to look seriously at the work of Letitia Landon and contemporaries of hers, such as Mary Russell Mitford, Felicia Hemans, and even Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who at first was far better known and respected than her husband-to-be. The attitude that prevailed in the early 1960s was epitomized in an episode that occurred in one of my college classes, when a distinguished literary critic made a sneering remark about Lady Blessington, and elicited guffaws of laughter from students who had probably never heard of the author, and certainly had never read a line of her work. One of many welcome results of the feminist movement is that prominent women writers of earlier periods are once again being appreciated.

In recent times, one of the first writers to call critical attention to Landon was Germaine Greer, in an influential essay published in 1982. Since then, Landon has been the subject of dissertations, scholarly articles, and lectures at conferences. Her work has been included in anthologies. Two biographical studies appeared in 1995, and a volume of selections with a lengthy, valuable bibliography of her writings appeared in 1997. Texts of most of Landon’s major works are now in print, and further books about her are in preparation. Thanks to such publications, readers have the means to make their own assessment of Landon.

The question might arise just what do I personally find so fascinating about L.E.L. Like many of Landon’s contemporaries, I am impressed by the immediacy of her voice. When I read her works, I sense her mind and presence, full of knowledge, reflection, observation, insight, warmth of feeling, sharpness of wit, and brilliant verbal expression. Beyond this there is no space here to say more, but the major texts are now in print, readily available. I encourage readers to see for themselves.

Recommended Readings:

Greer, Germaine. Slip-Shod Sibyls. London and New York: Viking/Penguin, 1995.
Landon, Letitia Elizabeth. The Improvisatrice 1825, with an introduction by Jonathan Wordsworth. Poole, England, and New York: Woodstock Books, 1996.
McGann, Jerome, and Riess, Daniel, editors. Letitia Elizabeth Landon: Selected Writings. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Literary Texts, 1997.
Stephenson, Glennis. Letitia Landon: The Woman behind L.E.L. Manchester University Press, 1995.
The series of Letitia Elizabeth Landon volumes edited by F. J. Sypher, including: Poetical Works (1991); The Fate of Adelaide (1991); Ethel Churchill (1992); Critical Writings (1996); The Vow of the Peacock (1997); Romance and Reality (1998); Francesca Carrara (1999); and Traits and Trials of Early Life (1999). Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints.

Francis J. Sypher (CC ‘86) is a writer and lives in Manhattan. His travels as a Fulbright lecturer in West Africa led him to explore the work of Letitia Elizabeth Landon.

Return to COSMOS 1999 Table of Contents
Return to COSMOS Journals
Return to COSMOS Home Page